i’m pretty ignorant on the state of australian news, so take what i’m about to say with a grain of salt.

it seems to me like the use of quotes might not be hostile, since they only use quotes when discussing the “gender affirmation model”, and they don’t use quotes around the phrase “gender-affirming”, which shows up in a few places in the article. so, the use of quotes might be used to emphasize that they’re discussing the gender affirmation model itself. the page i linked also specifically talks about preferring the phrase “gender affirmation” over “gender transition”, so maybe that’s part of what’s going on as well. another possibility is that it seems like the model is more commonly referred to as the “gender affirmative model” instead of the “gender affirmation model”, so the quotes might be trying to highlight that discrepancy.

but again, this is all just speculation on my part. i’m not trying to defend/excuse anything, and it would be nice to hear from people who know more about this stuff.